M8 - The Lagoon Nebula in RGB (Andrew Barton)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Sagittarius (Sgr) · Contains: 7 Sgr · 9 Sgr · B296 · B88 · B89 · Lagoon Nebula · M 8 · NGC 6523 · NGC 6526 · NGC 6530 · Sh2-25 · The star 7Sgr · The star 9Sgr

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M8 - The Lagoon Nebula in RGB

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M8 - The Lagoon Nebula in RGB

This is only my second attempt to image the Lagoon Nebula. After getting started in astrophotography I quickly realized that from my location north of Tucson, Arizona this was going to be a difficult subject to do justice as it is located low and directly over sky glow of Tucson. In fact many of the iconic subjects located near the center of the summer Milky Way have been similarly off limits. Since completing my remote observatory in the Patagonia Mountains north of the Mexican border, all of these beauties are now available to me.

Processing the Lagoon was a bit of a surprise to me. M8 is still low on the horizon and only rises above the wall of my observatory for about four hours a night. So it took four sessions to acquire the data for this image. But once I started processing the data, I discovered a very strong signal. I am a little bit under sampled so I used drizzle integration to try and recover some resolution. Normally I notice an increase in noise after applying drizzle, but not this time. In fact, after stacking this data, I used no further noise reduction. The resulting integration was so clean I was afraid noise reduction artifacts would outweigh the benefits of any noise attenuation. Very little processing was required to finish this composition.

Imaged mornings of:

2021-05-12

2021-05-13

2021-05-14

2021-05-18

Arizona Astrophotographers

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4545059
PixInsight job	KDT0I7EARQ74WG58K1SWN8H1VF7R8582
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	18h03m58s.259
RA (top/left)	18h01m24s.517
RA (top/right)	18h06m32s.670
RA (bottom/right)	18h06m31s.870
RA (bottom/left)	18h01m25s.378

Dec (center)	-24°17′29″.34
Dec (top/left)	-24°41′17″.58
Dec (top/right)	-24°41′15″.27
Dec (bottom/right)	-23°53′31″.31
Dec (bottom/left)	-23°53′31″.88

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M8 - The Lagoon Nebula in RGB

M8 - The Lagoon Nebula in RGB

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M8 - The Lagoon Nebula in RGB

M8 - The Lagoon Nebula in RGB

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